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Friday, 14 September 2018

Review: Naked Tarot - Sassy, Stripped-Down Advice

Naked Tarot - it's a title that's bound to make you look twice, isn't it?

If you do take a peek underneath the covers you won't be disappointed either (well, unless you are actually hoping for an occult sex-fetish book rather than some straightforward, commonsense suggestions for improving your tarot-reading skills).

Author Janet Boyer has decades of experience as a tarot reader. She has also created some lovely decks herself, including the Snowland set and Coffee Tarot (with her artist husband Ron), and written several earlier books, including Back in Time Tarot and Tarot in Reverse.

This is her latest and it is brilliant. Although it is a thick book, with loads of information inside, it isn't waffley. It gets straight to point. Naked Tarot is also original - Janet looks at a huge variety of different ways you can view tarot when doing readings. She includes ways of using symbolism from everyday life - such as music and TV programmes - as well as more traditional things like the elements, the seasons or Jungian archetypes. Pick what works for you and don't feel you have to stick to meanings made up in prudish Victorian times.

Spiritual adventurers are burning for truth, hungry for ways to affect and improve their destiny. Tarot can deliver, but most books offer impractical, confusing, irrelevant and regurgitated card interpretations, causing seekers to throw up their hands to say “I just don’t get it!”

The good news? No Golden Dawn snooze-fest or Crowley catatonia in the book you’re holding. With raw simplicity and outrageous honesty, author Janet Boyer presents helpful, hilarious and relevant advice that will forever change how you see the cards, and finally equip you to understand, and read, the Tarot. No punches pulled. No sugarcoating. It’s time to be forearmed, forewarned and foresighted. It’s time to get…naked.

I'm an experienced tarot reader myself, but Naked Tarot has helped me see the cards in new ways that are, as the subtitle says, both sassy and stripped-down.